The Oslo Accords have resulted in a series of compromises, each one exacerbating the harm done to the Palestinians and undermining seriously important matters, such as the refugees’ right of return. Instead of advocating for decolonisation, the accords have produced decades of futile rhetoric about a “two-state solution” and wasted much of the Palestinians’ valuable time. At the other end of the spectrum, however, the Israelis have exploited the time-wasting “negotiations” to facilitate its colonial expansion on a daily basis.

Ahead of a meeting between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, prior to addressing the UN General Assembly, senior Abbas advisor Nabil Shaath declared that it would be “utterly ridiculous” if Trump failed to commit himself to the two-state imposition. According to the Times of Israel, Shaath also expressed the opinion that scant results are expected from the forthcoming meeting: “I don’t know if Mr. Trump has much to say. Already his delegation that was here, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Greenblatt, have requested a waiting period of three to four months before Mr Trump is ready with a formulation to get the peace process started.”

The fact that Palestine is always discussed, even by Palestinian leaders, from a position of inferiority, shackles any potential for alternative thought and action. PA leaders are quick to describe as political drawbacks such waiting periods requested by the US or imposed upon Palestine by the international community. Yet the PA’s willingness to accept such delays has turned them into a permanent farce which demonstrates the irresponsibility of the main diplomatic actors.

For Israel, the US and the international community, these periods of alleged inaction serve as time for planning and executing further oppression in the form of settlement expansion, house demolitions and other punitive measures. It also includes curbs on the development of Palestinian society by targeting education premises, for example, as happened at the beginning of the new academic year recently.

Palestinian leaders, on the other hand, have been busy with crippling Gaza into political submission with another attempt at reconciliation. Although described as the means towards ending Palestinian disunity, this could have severe repercussions if the aim is to eliminate the remaining strands of resistance to the Israeli occupation. Achieving this aim under such cruel circumstances as besieging and persecuting Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank respectively is neither a cause for celebration nor an exercise in pragmatism.

The PA is reflecting what the international community has been imposing upon Palestinians politically. Shaath’s comments indicate there is no will on behalf of the PA other than to persist with the two-state paradigm even though it has been declared obsolete by most sensible analysts. For the US and the international community, complying with such demands is not problematic, given the present acquiescence to the downward spiral started by the Oslo Accords.

If Trump fails to “commit” to the two-state compromise, the waiting period will be used as a metaphor of complaint and compliance. It there is explicit mention of the imposition, though, the PA might celebrate what it would call a victory. In reality, it is spiralling towards destruction even as it claims victory in the farce that is Palestinian reconciliation. Such are the consequences of Oslo, for which the full price has still to be paid by Palestine and its people.

On 13 September 1993 the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel signed the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, or what has commonly become known as the Oslo Accords.

This, according to UN documents, aimed to establish the general guidelines for negotiations between the PLO and Israel, lay the foundations for a Palestinian interim self-government in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a transitional period of five years and lays the basis for permanent status talks based on Security Council resolutions 242 and 338.

Twenty-four years after the announcement of this agreement – which should have achieved at least some gains for the Palestinians, including peace, security, economic growth and a final settlement – the Palestinians instead have been moving from one big loss to another, starting from the shrinking of their proposed homeland, to the loss of security and safety and ending with economic hardships and movement restrictions which have made their life unbearable.

Meanwhile, the co-sponsors of this notorious agreement, mainly the United States which hosted the signature ceremony of the agreement, has done nothing except take the side of the Israeli occupation, showering it with dollars, doubling all forms of support and sending the most recent and developed weapons, hundreds of tonnes of which were dropped on the heads of Palestinians in Gaza between 2006 and 2014.

The parties and the sponsors of the agreement agreed to solve the Palestinian issue based on the UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which is a reconfirmation of 242. This resolution stipulates the withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in 1967, which are the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula.

However, all of the aforementioned areas are still occupied by Israel except the Sinai Peninsula, which was handed back after a separate peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in the 1970s. In addition, the Israeli grip over the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip has increased.

Briefly, in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, Israel has planted hundreds of military checkpoints, expanded illegal settlements that have eaten up large swathes of Palestinian farms and residential areas, built an illegal separation wall that divides the occupied West Bank into small cantons, evicted Palestinians from their homes and handed them to Israeli settlers under weak pretexts. Israeli authorities have demolished thousands of homes under the pretext that they lack building licenses and increased the number of settlers from 105,000 in 1993 to more than 765,000 at the end of 2015.

Israel dismantled illegal settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005 under the pressure of the primitive homemade rockets that showered over them for a couple of years. However, Gaza remains under the full control of the Israeli occupation, which has imposed a strict siege on the coastal enclave since the victory of Hamas in the 2006 elections.

The Israeli siege has made Gaza “unliveable” and the sponsors of the Oslo Agreement have done nothing. Gaza came under four major offensives between 2006 and 2015 that claimed the lives of thousands of Palestinian civilians, wounded tens of thousands others, devastated infrastructure, paralysed hospitals, destroyed schools and universities and made Gaza’s children unable to “sleep, study or play,” Save the Children said, mainly due to the electricity and environmental crises.

Moreover, the area of the Gaza Strip has shrunk from 362km2 in 1994 to 275km2 in 2005. Israel occupied this land and made it no-man’s land.

The UN Security Council resolution which the Oslo Agreement is based on guarantees freedom of navigation through international waterways in the area, however, Palestinians are not only prevented from navigating through these international waterways, but prevented from sailing more than six and sometimes nine nautical miles for fishing.

Article V of the agreement stipulates that Palestinians collect taxes directly, however, it is actually Israel who is collecting the taxes, deducting administrative fees and transferring them to Palestinians. Tax money has been used by Israel to exploit the Palestinians as Israel will arbitrarily stop transferring it to cause a financial crisis to pressure Palestinians to conform to the Israeli agenda.

The parties and sponsors of Oslo agreed to implement interim self-governance arrangements and a framework to facilitate the negotiations for the final status issues by the end of 1999. However, more than two and half decades later the situation is deteriorating and no progress has been made.

Palestinian politicians from inside and outside the PLO have criticised the agreement, stressing it was an opportunity for Israel to expand its occupation. “Oslo was the greatest idea Israel ever had. It let them continue the occupation without paying any of the costs,” Secretary General of the left wing Palestinian National Initiative Mustafa Barghouti has said.

Taysir Khalid, member of the PLO’s Executive Committee and member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said that Oslo and the following agreements between the Palestinian Authority and Israel “were catastrophic at all levels”.

The former US President Jimmy Carter, who engineered Israel and Egypt’s peace deal, said that he is “practically hopeless” that anything US President Donald Trump comes up with would be “justice to the Palestinians”. At the same time Israeli parties are discussing plans to annex Palestinians territories.

A UN report issued today says: “We are no closer to a sustainable solution that meets the needs and aspirations of Palestinians and Israelis alike… The absence of a political process for achieving the two-state solution remains a serious impediment to Palestine’s development.”

The question now is, what will Oslo bring for the Palestinians more than suffering?

Israeli newspaper Haaretz this week published minutes of a secret meeting between then-Israeli premier Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres, who was head of the opposition at the time. The discussions took place on 31 August 1978, ahead of Begin’s talks with Egypt’s leader Anwar Sadat at Camp David, the US presidential retreat.

For Haaretz, the minutes “lay bare the hawk that peacemaker Peres once was”. In fact, the document gives a valuable insight into what shaped Peres’s world view to the very end: settler colonial racism.

What is most instructive about comparing the Peres of 1978 to the Peres of, say, the 1993 Oslo Accords, is not what changed – which was an issue of strategy – but what remained consistent: his overarching motivation. Let’s take each in turn.

Much changed - but much didn't

First, what changed. As the minutes show, the Shimon Peres who proudly helped found the first illegal settlements in the West Bank believed “that Jordan is also Palestine,” adding: “I’m against… another Palestinian country, against an Arafat state.”

Yet fast forward a mere 15 years, and Peres is signing on the dotted line to create that very same “Arafat state". It's a choice of wording that, in hindsight, is ironically prescient about the permanently interim Palestinian Authority established with Israel’s blessing.

He went on: “We’ll reach 1.8 million Arabs, and I see our situation as getting very difficult and not a matter of police or prison… I see them eating the Galilee and my heart bleeds.” Note how in 2005 he was still describing Palestinian citizens as a “demographic threat".

Peres added: “They live in houses in Afula and in Acre and they take over entire streets. The moshavim [rural collective communities] are full of Arab labourers, and Jews sitting in their houses and playing tennis and the Arabs are working in the fields. That doesn’t seem right to me.”

Thus Peres “the hawk” already believed that some kind of “partition” would be necessary because of that age-old Zionist problem: “What to do with the Arabs.” Peres “the dove” saw the Oslo peace process as the answer to the question that had bothered him years earlier.

Peres also told Begin their areas of common ground for any deal. “We don’t agree to return to the 1967 borders, Jerusalem must remain unified and the defence of Israel must begin from the Jordan River with an IDF presence in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank].”

And what did Yitzhak Rabin tell the Knesset, weeks before he was assassinated in 1995? That the Oslo Accords would produce “a Palestinian entity… which is less than a state". A “united” Jerusalem. Israel retaining major settlements. The Jordan river becoming a “security” border in the “broadest meaning".

The problem for the Zionist project

It is a shame that these minutes had not been published prior to his death and the avalanche of eulogies from the great and the good about this “man of peace". For the problem with the coverage of Peres’s life was not just a whitewashing of his record by the omission of specific atrocities (although that was all too common).

No, it was deeper than that. It was the portrayal of Peres the “founding father,” the “hawk turned dove,” the tireless advocate of peaceful compromise, reflecting a widely held mythology about the Oslo Accords, the “peace process” and Zionism (and especially liberal Zionism) more generally.

The declassified document shows how the Israeli right and left are united by the question of what to do with the Palestinians. Yes, the answers differ. But that the very existence of the Palestinian people is a problem at all for the Jewish state is a belief shared by so-called hawks and doves alike.

Today, there are some Israeli politicians who wish to formally annex all or some of the West Bank. Then there are those like present Zionist Union member Tzipi Livni, who, on his passing, declared that “Shimon Peres was my teacher". She has urged “partition” of the land as a solution to the problem of what to do with the Palestinians.

The journey that several Israeli politicians are perceived to have travelled – Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, even Ariel Sharon – is one of strategy, not ideology. Ultimately, none has seen the Palestinians as equal human beings. Instead they have been a problem for the Zionist project.

- Ben White is the author of Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide and Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy. He is a writer for Middle East Monitor, and his articles have been published by Al Jazeera, al-Araby, Huffington Post, The Electronic Intifada, The Guardian’s Comment is free, and more.